October 30, 2019

It was recently brought to my attention that Apple removed support for .suit font installation in OSX 10.14 (Mojave), causing several H-Pi apps — namely microsynth, CSE, and Xentone — to show a font installation error on startup, and causing display errors in the apps. Interestingly, if a Mac user had migrated a system from an earlier OS version to Mojave, any installed .suit fonts would continue to work. This is why most uses of Mojave never saw a problem and nothing was reported to me. Only new users installing the software for the first time ran into the problem. Since the corresponding Windows versions of all the apps have been using a .ttf TrueType version of the font since inception, and since Mac now supports .ttf (which was not true when these apps were first released), fixing the problem involved simply replacing the font and changing a few lines of code in each app referencing the file name on installation.

Funnily enough, this problem with Mojave was only reported when OSX 10.15 Catalina was released. I have no statistics here, but typically the majority of musicians using MacOS remain intentionally one OS version behind the currently released version, so that things will work, because with each new OS update, Apple breaks more and more compatibility. Catalina is horrific in this regard, breaking compatibility with all 32-bit code. While my software has been updated to 64-bit builds and everything should work on OSX Catalina, I can't guarantee that there won't be issues. My advice is the same as all other software producers: DO NOT INSTALL OSX CATALINA!

In any case, if you happen to be running MacOS 10.14 or higher and are installing H-Pi software for the first time, as long as you download the latest version of the software, you shouldn't see a problem. MacOS updates have been posted for microsynth, CSE, and Xentone. These updates don't affect Windows users.

Best Regards,
Aaron